Trinity Forum Conversations

What makes a good life? In the fragmented and harried age we inhabit, what habits of attention, reflection, and action orient us toward what is good, true, and beautiful? 

The season of Lent is a good time for us to tackle such “big questions.” Drawing on his popular course at Yale, theologian and author Miroslav Volf joined us for an online conversation in 2024, where we explored these questions for a live audience.
"What is the treasure for which you would be willing to sell everything that you have? And if you know what the treasure is, are you willing ... to risk everything to have that treasure?"
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture in New Haven, Connecticut. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Life Worth Living, A Public Faith, Public Faith in Action, and Exclusion and Embrace (winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and selected as among the 100 best religious books of the twentieth century by Christianity Today). Educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, Volf regularly lectures around the world.
Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Man's Search for Meaning; Viktor Frankl
On Happiness; Thomas Aquinas
Brave New World; Aldous Huxley
How Much Land Does a Man Need? Leo Tolstoy
Wrestling with God; Simone Weil

As we continue our journey through the season of Lent, we’re offering a series to help each of us prepare the way of the Lord. As we go deeper in our spiritual practices during these days, our guide today is the author and psychiatrist Dr. Curt Thompson. 

In this conversation, Curt talks about the virtue, and discipline, of pursuing hope, even amid the darkness of a broken world:
"While I am working to move toward Jesus, while I'm moving to be further in the dance of the Trinity, I continue to suffer because evil is not about to go quietly into the night ... [we must] posture ourselves with our suffering in the same way that the Holy Trinity does when it comes to the suffering that Jesus experienced, such that we can join him in that."
This episode is drawn from an online conversation recorded in 2023. View the transcript and other resources there.
Related Trinity Forum Readings:
Confessions; St Augustine
God's Grandeur; Gerard Manley Hopkins
Bulletins from Immortality; Emily Dickinson
On Friendship; Cicero
On Happiness; Aquinas
Man's Search for Meaning; Viktor Frankl

Welcome to the Trinity Forum Conversations podcast. 

As we move through the season of Lent, we’re offering a series to help each of us prepare the way of the Lord. It’s a good time to take stock of our spiritual practices, and our guide today is the author and professor Alan Noble. 

In his book, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden & Gift of Living, Alan contends that simply deciding to engage with the world each day constitutes a declaration of the goodness of God:
“Now, there may come times when you are required by your suffering to radically depend upon others to carry you out of bed. My advice is to embrace those moments, knowing that you’ll carry your neighbor in return when the time comes.”This episode is drawn from an Online Conversation recorded in 2023. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

As we move into the season of Lent, we’re offering a series to help each of us prepare the way of the Lord. It’s a good time to take stock of our spiritual practices, and today’s guide is the author John Mark Comer. 

In his book Practicing the Way, John Mark explores the practical realities of what it means to be an apprentice of Jesus:
“It seems to me that the telos of the spiritual journey in the Christian way is becoming a person of love through deepening union with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit…It’s the two greatest commandments: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself, that Jesus put at the center of apprenticeship to him.” This episode is drawn from an online conversation recorded in 2024.

Many of us have been grieved by the polarization we see rending so many churches. What role has this played in America’s growing secularization and what our guest has called “the great dechurching”? And is that dechurching now actually in reverse? Fundamentally, what can we do to pursue the flourishing of both the church and the nation?

In this episode, our guide is Ryan Burge, an ordained minister, best-selling author and professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University. 

His book The Vanishing Church draws upon his scholarship as a data scientist, and his experience as a pastor, to explore how the church has been harmed by, and can offer healing from, the excesses of political combat and division:
"[Attending church] is just good for your soul. It's just good for you as a person to be part of a community like that ... I think it's actually going to be good for democracy for you to realize what it's like to go ... get in the real world and realize it's actually a cool place to hang out, and there's value in that."This episode is drawn from an online conversation recorded in 2026. Please subscribe to this podcast - it helps people find us.

And we hope you’ll consider becoming a member of our community, the Trinity Forum Society. Join us in exploring timeless Christian wisdom together, so you gain clarity and courage for your own life, and help cultivate a renewed culture of hope. You can do this at our website, ttf.org.